There is lots of e-waste(electronic waste) that is thrown away every day. Instead of simply getting rid of it and adding to the pile of e-waste why not reuse that material to make awesome things?

One of the many things you can make with some extra broken electronics you found the other day or the old electronic junk you thought was useless now includes a 3D printer.

3D printers are basically printers that make models using a plastic(called filament). The 3D printer pulls the filament into a hot metal head called the extruder which heats the plastic to a constant temperature and then pushes it out of the nozzle onto a small plate. The 3D printer stacks up several layers of plastic filament in order to make a model that you program it to print.

3D printers can cost lots of money, so to save some change try doing this instead and in the process help cut down on the worlds overgrowing e-waste pile.

Step 1: The Axes to Allow Your 3D Printer to Move.

In order to allow your 3D printer to move you will need to have some sort of motor that can allow the extruder to move up, down, left, and right. For this you will need to have an x, y, and z axis. To make these you simply need to get:

1 floppy disk drive stepper motors

2 normal CD or DVD drives that can be taken from a computer

When you get the motors you will need to strip them almost completely down to where there is nothing left but what is in the above pictures. Basically just the frame, the motor, and the rod to move the motor.

Step 2: Soldering

You will need to prepare the motors by soldering on cables to them. They will later be soldered onto another part of the 3D printer to allow them to move.

Motors that you will need:

the 3 stepper motors from the last step

1 NEMA 17 motor used to drive plastic filament for the extruder.

For now you need some cables and a soldering iron along with some heat-shrink tubes. You need to solder the cables onto the connections of the motors and then put some of the tubes on and heat them up with the soldering iron to allow them to fit onto the cables.

Step 3: Power Supply

You will need:

A PC power supply

cables

RAMPS 1.4 board

Soldering iron

In order to allow the PC power supply to supply power for your RAMPS board you need to short out a black and green cable by soldering another cable in between the two. After doing that you grab a yellow and a different black cable from the power supply and use them to power your RAMPS board.

Step 4: The Arduino IDE

To later on make the motors move you will need to download the Arduino software which you can get here, http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software, you need to download version 1.6.6.